Hello MikuDB! I’m back to share some more great PVs with you and hopefully shed some light on how they contribute to the experience of their songs. If you’re confused about the “Part 2” in the title, here is a link to Part 1. I decided to break this into two parts because I didn’t want one article to run so long, but there are a few more Kikuo songs I’d like to write about (he’s got a wealth of great material). I’d also really appreciate some feedback on what kind of material you’d like to see. You can comment here or PM me with any comments you have. Once again, I’ll include links to the videos and lyrics. Without further ado, let’s dive in!
Breaking Things Into Pieces
“Breaking Things Into Pieces” (lyrics) is a song about a boy who likes to break things. At the beginning, the narrator seems to speak as a child, expressing the compulsion to break other people’s things. He takes joy in destroying precious objects and seeing people react angrily and cry. He puts things back together to break them again and calls it playing. Later, he attributes a deeper meaning to his destructive habit: people’s souls become attached to objects, and he wants to destroy those souls, gaining pleasure from others’ pain. Even so, someone loves him, and he loves her. But her soul is now planted on him, and his on her, so he destroys himself (and maybe her) to satisfy his soul-crushing obsession.
Quick, disturbing images and animations riddle the video, and, just as the song is written in the perspective of the destroyer, I believe this is meant to give the viewer a sense of the narrator’s troubled mind and warped perception. We see images of unsettling faces in the first part, which may be how the child sees the people around him, with their angry and disgusted looks, whose possessions he breaks. There are also many quick animations of violence shown in doodles and sketches, which hint at the childish way that he sees something that actually has immensely disturbing implications. They may look like stick figures, but they still display bloody murder. Also of note is the repeated animation of what looks like a fetus either breaking apart or becoming monstrous, or both. These all contribute to the grotesque atmosphere, but may also be hinting at the nature of the narrator. Then there’s a picture of a sunfish at one point. No idea what that is about.
Later in the video, we see repeated drawings of anime girls being broken into pieces, as if they were statues. At first, this put me off because the art style does not fit with the rest of the PV, but after some thinking, I believe it has to do with adding some meaning to the song through the PV. All of the girls are pretty, young, and drawn in anime style to make them look like an attractive girl who lots of people would fawn over, attaching their souls to her because she is loved and precious. This is the perfect kind of person for the narrator to want to destroy. Moving beyond precious objects, people would have more souls that are more strongly attached. Also of note is that some of them have frightened expressions and/or defensive poses while others look completely unaware, as though they may have been either attacked or taken by surprise. These images come as he mentions destroying souls, but he does not only say souls attached to precious things, he also says “How I wish to erase your living soul” and “Upon the moment when your soul disappears,” which seem to reinforce the idea that he is killing people, specifically young girls. With this, the song becomes the story of a serial killer, from his early stages to his killing mindset and finally to his demise.
The last part of the PV is filled with disturbing faces and chaotic visuals, perhaps signifying the neurotic struggle faced by the narrator as he decides that he will kill himself and possibly his lover because of his obsession with breaking things. He clearly says that he enjoys how he feels as he dies, but the last line might hint at some regret: “just let it be, so I won’t be able to say ‘sorry’ to you.” The song gives us a look into the mind of an unstable, destructive person, who is not saved by love, but rather destroyed by it because he destroys what is loved. The morbid absurdity of it is wonderful.
That was longer than I thought it would be, but the next songs will not have nearly as much analysis, so please hang in there.
Chiri Chiri Juso
The next song is one I’m sure many of you have heard, called “Chiri Chiri Juso“. The lyrics won’t be as important for this one, at least as far as examining the PV goes. The song is generally about how all things come to an end and turn to dust, and the cycle of ends and beginnings. In this case, the video does not follow a story told by the song, like in the previous PVs I’ve covered. For this song, the video adds that extra visual dimension needed to suck you into an aesthetic experience. The combination of the ethnic-sounding music, the timbre of IA’s voice, and the overwhelming colorful display is nearly hypnotizing. It gives you the sense of being drawn into an abstract dimension, feeding into the mystic theme of the song, which speaks of inevitable destruction. There’s not actually much to say about the visuals themselves that would not be better left to seeing them, but the synthesis of the PV and the song create such a good audio-visual experience, that I felt the need to bring it up as a valuable PV. So turn the lights off, the volume up, and go full screen for this one.
Moon Demon
Last but not least is one of my personal favorites, “Moon Demon“. Once again, I won’t be analyzing the meaning of the lyrics much. Not because there’s nothing to examine, but because it doesn’t play into the PV as much (I think). Similar to “Chiri Chiri Juso,” what I like about this PV is the way it complements the music it is set to, but not quite in the same way. What stands out to me about this song is the contrast it holds to itself. It rides on a slow and steady jazz beat that is consistent through the song, but that beat is overlaid with the seemingly chaotic and dissonant sounds of piano, saxophone, and other jazz instruments. The PV’s visuals draw a parallel to the song: the video rides on a steady pan across a single, long illustration, but the illustration is a bizarre landscape of unintelligible grotesque scenes. Perhaps the illustration has something to do with the song, which is about children playing and dying under the moon, presumably because of demons, but the steady walk through strangeness and chaos in the song and PV is what caught my attention about this one. It’s not quite so intense as “Chiri Chiri Juso”, but I think it has it’s own value.
That wraps up my lectures on Kikuo PVs! I hope you enjoy them as much as I do! Please feel free to share your opinions and recommendations, and again, feedback is appreciated! Thank you for reading!
-TheImmortalHottentot
I think pretty much everyone went “oh, this is pretty good, I wonder what the lyrics mean”when listening to one of Kikuo’s songs and then immediately went “Jesus Christ, Kikuo, what the hell?” after checking them.
It’s really surprising given the tone of some of the music, but I love that contrast. There’s so much to explore with his songs, both analytically and imaginatively.
And I thought I made large paragraphs per song. I pale in comparison to you. Ha ha
Well I wouldn’t do this much for something like an album review. That would be absurdly long.